We put a lot of doorbells up. And once that's done, the bell's on, the chime is in the hall, the family's set up on the app, a lot of people consider the job finished. The front of the house is sorted. Job done.
The thing is, the front of the house is rarely where anyone gets in. Most break-ins around Dublin and the Leinster commuter belt happen at the side gate, the rear patio door, or a detached garden building. None of which a front doorbell sees. This piece is about what we tell customers when they ask "should I get cameras anywhere else?", and what we've genuinely seen work.
The vulnerability nobody plans for
The instinct is: protect the front door because that's where visitors come from. That's fair for visitors, package thieves, the daily noise of a normal house. But the people who are actually trying to get in without you noticing are doing the opposite, they want the part of the house no neighbours can see and no doorbell is pointing at.
The pattern we see when we're called out to add cameras after the fact is consistent. A semi-D in Beaumont, a four-bed in Castleknock, an estate house in Clane, the way they got in was the side gate, the rear extension door, or sometimes through a garden gate at the bottom of the property that the owners didn't even consider a real entry point. The break-in often takes under three minutes. There's usually no warning.
Side gates and the semi-detached blind spot
The semi-detached layout has one obvious weak point: the alleyway down the side of the house between the gable wall and the boundary. Sometimes it's gated. Often the gate is six feet of plywood that you could lift over in five seconds. Either way, once someone's in that alley, they're between the front of the house (the only place with a camera) and the back garden (where the patio door is). They're also out of sight of the road.
What we do on a side-gate camera is straightforward. A motion-activated camera with a built-in floodlight mounted high on the gable wall, looking down the alley toward the front gate. The motion sensor triggers the light and the recording the moment something enters the alley. From a deterrent standpoint, that floodlight kicking on when someone steps in is the single most effective piece of kit in the system. Most people turn around and leave.
The Ring Floodlight Cam and the Eufy equivalent both do this job. The Ring one talks to the rest of the Ring ecosystem so the side gate triggering can also flash the doorbell chime inside the house. The Eufy version is more standalone but cheaper to run because there's no subscription needed. Either works. We'd weigh it the same way we weighed it in the Ring vs Eufy piece. What's the rest of the system?
Garden offices: the new target
This one's changed completely since 2020. The work-from-home garden office is everywhere now, proper insulated cabins with a laptop on a desk, sometimes a second screen, sometimes equipment worth four figures inside. They're typically at the bottom of the garden, often visible from the back lane or the back of the neighbouring estate, and almost never alarmed.
The pattern: opportunistic break-ins of garden offices have crept up steadily over the last three years, and the people doing them know exactly what they're looking for. Laptop, tablet, maybe a camera or DSLR if the owner's a creator type. In and out in two minutes. The owner doesn't even know until they go down in the morning to start work.
What we put on garden offices: a camera under the eaves pointing at the door, motion-only recording, and crucially, a contact sensor on the door itself if the homeowner has an alarm system. The contact sensor means the alarm can fire the same as if a window was broken in the main house. The camera gives you the footage. Both together mean someone who tries it gets a phone alert, a recording, and a loud alarm within seconds. Most people will not push through that.
We also recommend keeping the garden office Wi-Fi on the main house network rather than its own separate router, because a camera on its own Wi-Fi can be defeated by simply unplugging the router. Camera on the main house Wi-Fi can't.
Rear extensions and patio doors
Modern Irish houses are increasingly built or extended with a big glass back. Bifold doors, sliders, full-height windows. Architecturally beautiful. Security-wise, a known weak point.
What we do: a camera mounted on the gable wall or under the soffit covering the back of the house, ideally with a wide enough field of view to catch the patio area and the rear fence line in the same frame. The trick on Irish builds is the camera's field of view versus the depth of the back garden. A standard doorbell-style camera will show you someone at the patio door but won't catch them coming over the back fence. A wider- lens floodlight cam (or two cameras at different angles) is usually the right call.
On the door itself: if there's an alarm system, contact sensors on every leaf of a bifold or sliding door. Sounds excessive. Isn't, the way bifolds are forced is one leaf at a time. A sensor on just the main leaf isn't enough.
What a properly layered system looks like
When we talk about "layered defence" we're not selling something fancy. We're describing the principle that each piece of kit does one thing well and together they cover the whole perimeter. A working example for a typical four-bed semi-D:
One: doorbell at the front, covering arrival and the porch area. Two: floodlight cam on the gable wall, covering the side alley. Three: rear camera under the soffit, covering the patio and back garden. Four: contact sensors on the back door, the patio doors, and any ground-floor windows that aren't fitted with restrictor stays. Five, if there's a garden building, a camera and a sensor on it.
That's the perimeter. A determined burglar can defeat any single one of those, but together they make the house properly noisy and properly visible. Most opportunistic break-ins are looking for a quiet target. A layered system makes you not the quiet target.
Where the alarm fits in
The conversation a lot of people skip: cameras record, alarms react. They do different jobs. A camera tells you what happened. An alarm tries to stop it happening.
We're increasingly recommending the Ring Alarm to customers who are already going Ring on the cameras, because the single app handles both. You arm the house from your phone, the sensors trigger if someone breaches them, the sirens go off, you get an alert, and optionally Ring's assisted monitoring can call a contact for you. It's covered under the same subscription that runs the cameras, no extra monthly fee.
If you're Eufy on the cameras, the Eufy alarm is its own thing and it doesn't integrate as cleanly. Most of our customers in that situation either stick with a standalone alarm (Phonewatch, HomeSecure, whoever) or switch to Ring for the integration. We've done both.
What it costs vs what a break-in costs
A full layered system, front doorbell, side floodlight cam, rear camera, contact sensors, an alarm, for a standard semi-D typically costs €1,500 to €2,500 in kit, plus install. That's a real number and we're not going to pretend it's small. Most households spread it: doorbell first, side gate six months later, the rest of the perimeter the following year.
The break-in figure people quote is usually the value of what got stolen, laptops, jewellery, a couple of grand of personal stuff. The number that lands harder is the insurance excess (€500 to €1,000 typically) plus the premium hike for the next three or four years (often €200 to €400 a year). Plus the bit you can't put a number on, which is how the house feels for six months after.
We're not in the fear-selling business, most houses don't get broken into, and we'll be the first to say if you live in a quiet cul-de-sac in Foxrock you probably don't need the full perimeter. But if you're in an estate that's had a couple of breakins on the road in the last two years, or you've got a garden office with serious gear in it, it's worth thinking past the front door.
If you want a walkthrough of what your house specifically needs, not a sales pitch, that's what the complimentary consultation covers. We'll walk the perimeter with you and tell you straight which bits matter and which bits would be overkill for your setup.